The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld an International Trade Commission ruling that found Apple didn't violate a Motorola patent on communications between devices and data networks, reports say. The ruling, issued in May, specifically dealt with Claim 12 of the patent, and whether or not it covered the deletion of apps capable of receiving push notifications. The ITC determined that Apple's implementation of status updates to halt notifications was non-infringing.

In the Court of Appeals decision, it's said that Motorola didn't satisfy requirements to show a technical example of the invention in the Droid 2. It notes that while the Droid 2 and Apple products use similar features in terms of registering or unregistering for notifications, the implementations are, again, sufficiently different.

Apple and Motorola have been engaged in a long legal battle over the latter's Android phones. Motorola is owned by Google, and the closest proxy Apple has to targeting Google itself, the creator of Android. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs once infamously called Android "stolen," promising to go to "thermonuclear war" over his beliefs. Current CEO Tim Cook has adopted a softer stance, but is nevertheless persisting with existing lawsuits against the likes of Motorola and Samsung.